[icanhazdata]

I think YCSB is meant so that experts in each technology can tweak it for their system. So, it looks to me like you're in a great place to make that happen, and I'd love to see it!

Also, It's extremely difficult to get speedup of 4x on 4 cores, so I'll believe that argument when I see it. It seems to me that with the current implementation of Redis, you'd run into some serious problems with memory management if you run 4 redis nodes on one 4 core machine.

Also, you say: "This is a possible use case of Redis but not a very idiomatic / representative one." Can you elaborate? What is idiomatic? From the front page of the Redis site: "Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store."

Also, on a slightly different topic, I can't seem to find any real documentation about the consistency guarantees of Redis, so I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction. It appears that the master/slave replication scheme in Redis just backs up onto the slaves eventually, but the master immediately returns. Is that true? If a master goes down (disk and all), could a write have been confirmed to the client which is missing on a slave? What replication protocol does it use? I find the documentation lacking in this regard and it'd be great if you could point me to some actual technical specifications. Thanks!